Industry News
Powder Mountain’s owner Reed Hastings announced some major changes to its lift infrastructure and organizational vision today. In a letter attached below, Hasting outlines all of the exciting upgrades coming to the Utah resort as a result of a $20 million investment next summer, including the shift to a semi-private model where parts of the mountain will be accessible only to homeowners.
Dear Powder Community,
I’m writing to you today with an update on how we are staying uncrowded and unspoiled.
While many of you have been skiing here for generations, I joined this wonderful community only five years ago, and have quickly come to appreciate the soul and natural beauty of Powder Mountain. Sadly, Powder has been struggling financially, so I stepped in a few months ago to invest and find a sustainable path for staying uncrowded and independent.
Our approach is going to be a blend of public and private skiing, where real estate sales help fund lifts and lodges for everyone, and some of our public guests buy real estate to access private skiing. We are fortunate that we can improve our public resort next year and also offer private skiing to help real estate sales.
This summer we will be investing $20 million in three public lifts:
- A hi-speed detachable quad upgrade on Paradise, replacing a fixed-grip quad
- A fixed-grip quad upgrade on Timberline, replacing a 50-year-old fixed-grip double
- A new fixed-grip quad from the base of Timberline to the top of Lightning Ridge, opening up vast new lift-served intermediate and expert terrain, and enabling people to ski from Timberline down to Sundown. We’ll look to move our in-bounds cat route to somewhere else nearby.
In order to pay our bills, we need to sell more real estate, and to do that we are introducing private homeowner-only skiing a year from now. We will be designating the Village and Mary’s lifts, which serve beginner and intermediate terrain, plus a new lift on Raintree, for this private skiing, starting a year from now.
We believe this blend of public and private skiing secures us decades of exceptional uncrowded skiing for all, funded partially by real estate. To stay independent and uncrowded, we needed to change, and we didn’t want to join the successful but crowded multi-resort pass model (ie, Snowbasin) or sell to a conglomerate (ie, Vail).
We are dedicated to running a sustainable business, supporting our wonderful team, and contributing to this incredible community. Thank you for your support in Powder’s next chapter, which kicks off with the three new lifts!
Of course we are keeping the Powder Country bus service, we’ve upgraded the Timberline bathrooms, and we reduced the price of night skiing from $39 to $19 to make it more accessible for our community. Come on up!
See you on the mountain.
-Reed
Reed Hastings
CEO Powder Mountain
The new lifts are exciting, especially since for the first time in resort history Sundown and Lightning Ridge will be accessible from the Timberline base area, but the shift to a semi-private model is the biggest change coming to Powder Mountain. Parts of the resort that were once accessible to the public will now only be available to resort homeowners, including the epic Raintree Cat, which is being replaced by a private chairlift. The times sure are a’changing for Powder Mountain and the rest of the ski industry as seemingly every day we hear news of major resort upgrades. The real question is: how will this news be perceived by Pow Mow’s local community? For the public, some aspects of the resort will be taken away, while others will be added, like a brand new chairflift up to Lightning Ridge, which has arguably some of the mountain’s best terrain. Could this be a situation where everyone wins?
